Product category:
Process Control: SCADA, ERP, MES and networks
News Release from: BASF IT Services | Subject: SAP-AMS
Edited by the Processingtalk Editorial
Team on 01 June 2004
Joint SAP-AMS development experience at
Seal Sands
SAP-AMS is a joint development between BASF IT Services and Emerson Process Management - to enhance the AMS Suite - Intelligent Device Manager by providing connectivity to data and work flow processes
SAP-AMS is a joint development between BASF IT Services and Emerson Process Management - to enhance the AMS Suite - Intelligent Device Manager by providing connectivity to data and work flow processes in the SAP Plant Maintenance module It sits within a range of asset management solutions, providing the ability to optimise the cost of maintenance, cost of compliance, and the utilisation of assets
This article was originally published on Processingtalk on 14 Sep 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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Reviewing and optimising the work processes associated with implementing SAP-AMS in a plant maintenance environment achieves the benefits - not the technology alone.
This Case Study describes the experiences within BASF implementing such a solution.
SAP-AMS is a real-time condition-based asset management solution, offering the capability to identify problems earlier, intelligently filter and prioritise problems, improve compliance, and manage data and workflows through integration with SAP.
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It requires field-mounted devices to be capable of transmitting diagnostic information (either HART or Fieldbus), the AMS Suite - Intelligent Device Manager, the AMS Enterprise Server with the SAP Connector Module, and any version of SAP.
The product description identifies the circumstances where a company would use this product.
In particular, this product applies to: plant operators who are maintaining their own physical production assets, and maintenance contractors who are maintaining physical assets on behalf of others.
Where there are highly instrumented production units, these businesses are using, or considering, SAP as their 'CMMS' for plant maintenance.
Businesses concerned at the high impact of unscheduled downtime, cost of turnarounds, and ongoing maintenance spend.
Businesses required to demonstrate regulatory compliance through the effective management of instrument calibration records and configuration data.
It is against this background that the SAP-AMS product has been evaluated, with the expected benefits of: moving from a time-based preventative maintenance programme to a condition-based one; avoiding unnecessary maintenance work and deliver better utilisation of resources; pre-empting more expensive work later, if a fault is not acted-upon; avoiding unplanned downtime; ensuring compliance through improved asset management traceability; reducing erroneous data entry and administrative overheads.
The Seal Sands site is the largest BASF manufacturing facility in the UK: it is fully integrated, and is responsible for producing intermediate chemicals for the acrylic and nylon-based product supply chain.
The site was founded in 1969 by Monsanto to produce acrylonitrile, and expanded in 1976 adding new acrylonitrile, adiponitrile and hexamethylenediamine capacity.
Since then, investment has been focussed on de-bottlenecking, by-product recovery and environmental projects.
The original acrylonitrile plant has now been retired.
Investment in instrumentation and control since 1976 has been to use all-electronic systems, initially with Rosemount transmitters, Fisher ac and dc controls and Fisher valves.
The Fisher ac and dc controls were upgraded to Rosemount System 3 (RS3) during the late 80's and 90's, and now the Emerson DeltaV system is being phased-in.
There are three primary control rooms, all with RS3 networked as a redundant ring.
Each control room also has connectivity through interface adapters and buffer servers to a central PI System on the site LAN, providing plant floor information to PC users across the business.
This site has always been at the forefront in deploying integrated business systems to manage maintenance activity, stores, purchasing, technical data, and financials; initially running on IBM System/34, and then System/36, SAP R/2, and now SAP R/3.
As a result, substantial business know-how has been developed to optimise the benefit from these systems, particularly in the production planning and maintenance areas.
However it is realised that SAP R/3 can only continue to deliver additional business benefit after process workflows have been optimised through integration with other systems, such as plant-floor and specialist planning packages.
With the introduction of the AMS Suite - Intelligent Device Manager, the opportunity was taken to try to identify whether the wealth of predictive maintenance data available from the increasing number of 'Smart' devices on site could be used to further optimise work processes and reduce unscheduled downtime.
These 'Smart' devices started arriving on-site in the late 80's, with the introduction of digital electronics in the field, employing the HART protocol to transmit data back to the control room.
At that time, 'Smart' transmitters were only selected for high accuracy and rangeability duties, but they are now installed by default.
It is now often more cost-effective in the long-term to replace an aging analogue transmitter with a new 'Smart' one, rather than attempt a refurbishment.
So, out of an active site-wide population of around 4000 transmitters and 2000 control valves, approximately 10% of the transmitters and 1-2% of valves are 'Smart'.
Recent investments in environmental and by-product recovery plants have specified DeltaV and 'Smart' transmitters exclusively (accounting for ~200 transmitters and 20-30 valves).
Although not a significant percentage of the whole, it is worthwhile to compare the maintenance experience on 'Smart'-enabled plants with those that are not.
This study was completed on the Utilities unit.
It represents 25% of the total site instrumentation, with the highest proportion of 'Smart' instrumentation.
It is maintained by 5 instrument technicians, over 4 of whom are required to maintain the legacy systems, and less than 1 is required to maintain the new investments, although accounting for 30% of the total Utilities instrumentation.
Of the total maintenance effort on Utilities, 50-60% of the effort goes on time-based preventative maintenance (largely on the legacy instrumentation, on a 2-4 year maintenance cycle).
Of the remainder, (40-50%), approximately a third is spent repairing genuine faults - primarily aging control valves, analysers and pressure transmitters.
In the maintenance process, faults are typically identified by visual inspection or through alarms that have been activated.
A maintenance technician will investigate as far as he can without disrupting operating systems, to identify the repair work required.
A maintenance request is then raised on the faulty asset, to be picked-up by the maintenance planners.
It is the job of the maintenance planners to identify and schedule resources, and raise work orders on the different trades required to complete a repair.
If it is an unusual or complex job, an additional risk assessment will be required.
The objective is to prepare the job overnight (isolation, decontamination and permit initiation), such that the different trades required (e.g scaffolders, laggers, fitters, electricians, riggers, and the instrument technicians) can make an early start the next day.
Spares and technical data must also be available.
The anticipated benefits There is obviously a benefit anticipated when the move from time-based to condition-based maintenance is made, but with much of the resource currently expended on legacy equipment with no diagnostic functionality, this is not an easy task.
Where a device is found to be corroded, it is often more cost-effective to replace it by new.
With this policy in place, over a period it can be expected that the population of legacy devices will diminish, and maintenance will move towards condition-based, with the inherent 'Smart' functionality now available.
Every time a visit is made to a production unit, there is also potential to expose the worker to hazards.
If this can be avoided by the use of remote diagnostics, safe working will increase.
Thus a policy is required to capture the data in the AMS Suite from each device replaced, and to use its diagnostic capabilities to the full.
Given that only 30% of non-routine maintenance activity is currently effective, and each maintenance request initiates a demand on multiple resources, a better way is required to correctly diagnose potential faults, and to speed-up the work scheduling process.
Reducing the planning delay will impact positively on production availability.
Automatically raising a maintenance request from a genuinely diagnosed fault will achieve that.
Thus, over a period of time, reductions in maintenance cost and planning time, and an improvement in plant availability are foreseen.
IEC 61511 has made a significant impact.
The unavailability of a safety system can be classified by revealed and un-revealed faults.
Safety Integrity Level (SIL) calculations require estimates to be made of the duration and impact of these causes.
A mean time to repair (MTTR) in the range 8-12 hours is typically used by vendors to calculate the SIL for their product range.
To achieve this in a production environment requires better use of diagnostic data, and improved work-flow processes.
It is anticipated that optimising the fault detection, diagnostic, and corrective action processes will achieve that.
The experience so far shows that the new breed of 'Smart' devices is turning out to be remarkably reliable.
During the period of this study, there were two examples of when AMS detected un-revealed faults requiring repair.
One in an oxygen analyser used for boiler control (calibration problem), and another in a Coriolis flow meter (blocked tube).
To evaluate the business benefits before proceeding further, the SAP Connector has been set-up and tested in a development environment.
This provides intelligent filtering and prioritisation of diagnostic data (including checking that a maintenance request for the same job has not already been raised).
Having proved the business case, and the technology employed, the plan is to move this application into SAP Production by June 2004.
However, due to the improved reliability and initial small population of the new 'Smart' devices, we do not expect to see a dramatic impact on maintenance practices until a critical mass is achieved.
Over a period of time we do expect to see a gradual changing of attitudes towards increasing dependency on remote diagnostics and automated workflow processes, and this will accelerate the take-up, as it will be noticeable that the legacy devices are becoming the main drain on maintenance resources and cause of plant unavailability.
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